In the leafcutter bee industry a lot of wasted effort and resources are spent raising larvae which are believed to be healthy, but which in fact have been spoiled by parasites or are otherwise defective.
Known problems which interfere with healthy larvae in leafcutter bee cells include parasites, chalkbrood disease, pollen balls and other undesirables including stored pests and predators, dead larvae, 2nd generation, dead prepupae and damaged cells as described in the following:
Parasites: These are the #1 problem for the leafcutter bee industry
Prior art solution: We use insecticides during the incubation stage to try and control them before the bees emerge from there cells. Some of the difficulties with this is the insecticides are not healthy to work with.
Dichlorvos (the insecticide most widely used) is a known potential carcinogen in the U.S. and may be removed from the market at anytime by the environmental pest control agency.
Konk which is the other pesticide used, has questionable control and requires airflow systems which are very costly to install and are hard to put into existing incubation facilities.
Both types of insecticides cause healthy bee mortality regardless of how well they are used.
The Bee mortality that results from the use of these chemicals can be upwards of 50% if not controlled and aired out properly and even when done properly there is always a certain mortality every year.
It is desirable to remove 100% of the parasites in the larvae state during winter processing procedures and eliminate all previous methods of control. This alone would be a major breakthrough for the industry. We would have 0 mortality due to chemical residues or reparasitism. This would be a major financial benefit to the industry.
Chalkbrood disease: A fungus that infects healthy larvae.
It is further desirable to remove the chalkbrood cadavers and moldy cells during the winter storage period of the larvae.
Note: Fumigation would still be required due to spores within the cell mass, but they will be drastically reduced and the infestation levels should be much lower.
Some markets require 100% chalkbrood free samples or they are unacceptable. The process we are proposing could bring us to undetectable levels for these markets and also give us the ability to break into new markets with higher standards.
Pollen Balls: These are Pollen Masses that look like a good bee cell from the outside, but they are just masses of pollen on the inside.
They do not cause any adverse effects but can amount up to 50% of the total volume of product we are working with.
It is also desirable to remove the Pollen Balls.
This would decrease our incubation space required plus that percentage of related equipment ie. incubation trays, racks and storage space. It would make the overall operation much more efficient.
It is estimated that we are using 33% more space and equipment then we would have to if we could remove 99% of the unwanted cell mass. This would mean that we could immediately increase our incubation capacity of existing facilities by 33%.
Stored Pests and predators, dead larvae, 2nd Generation, dead prepupae and damaged cells.
These are other negative products that can potentially be removed from the healthy larvae.
In view of all these problems it is clearly desirable to sort the larvae cocoons if possible to avoid the wasted resources which are commonly spent. In the prior art, various devices are known for performing some form of sorting, for instance as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,757,354; 4,324,335; 4,666,045; 4,909,930; 4,946,045; 5,394,342; 5,738,224. None of these prior art references however can be suitably arranged to accommodate larvae cocoons so as to distinguish between good cocoons with healthy larvae and bad defective cocoons.